With the publication of her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the New York Times. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.

THE STORY: Adapted from the novel by Carson McCullers, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER explores a universal longing for connection. At its center is John Singer, a lonely deaf man, who becomes the confidant to a constellation of disparate souls--an ang

Sylvia Stanton has to wonder how every other man on campus can appreciate her except for that sorry, no-good Chad. After a bad decision on Sylvia's part, Chad is intent on making her pay for her indiscretion. Will Chad's actions on that traumatizing night pave the way for all of Sylvia's future relationships? They're all the same-the Chads, the Peters, the Williams-and now there's Terrance. All Sylvia is looking for is a man that has some of the same qualities as her father. She isn't looking for drop-dead good looks or money. All she needs to be happy is a good, strong man who is intelligent, who will love her for the woman she is, and with whom she can grow old. After all, there are women who don't have half the charm and good looks that she has, and they're walking around arm in arm with some beautiful brothers. At least that's the way it seems on the outside looking in. Sylvia would do anything to keep a man happy and satisfied. Yet here she is-stuck in Atlanta, still wishing and hoping. Will she ever find Mr. Right?

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and young niece, Ruth.

In one volume, the complete short fiction of the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, including her two most renowned novellas. Carson McCullers—novelist, dramatist, poet—was at the peak of her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes including loneliness in marriage and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Included in this volume are “The Member of the Wedding” and “The Ballad of the Sad Café,” novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be “assuredly among the masterpieces of our language.” “McCullers patented the Southern gothic genre that embraces grotesque, morbid characters with such pervading themes as unrequited love and wounded adolescence. Largely set in the South and richly autobiographical, her writings have endured because of their great power and originality.” —Library Journal

Carson McCullers was deemed the "find of the decade" when she appeared on the literary scene at the age of twenty-three and is best remembered for her celebrated novels "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" and "The Member of the Wedding." This book provides a balanced introductory study of her major fiction and shows her as more than a lesbian novelist.

The Lonely Hunter is widely accepted as the standard biography of Carson McCullers. Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements--and more--of a tragic novel. From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions. To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer.